Computer scientists have discovered a way to number-crunch an individual’s own preferences to recommend content from others with opposing views. The goal? To burst the “filter bubble” that surrounds us with people we like and content that we agree with.

I’ve been a very busy boy. All day, we’ve been chasing the scoundrel with our stolen bitcoins through the blockchain. Around lunchtime (UK), I was chasing him across the roof of a moving train, (metaphorically). I was less than 20 minutes, or 2 blockchain confirmations, behind “Tomas”. He was desperately creating new wallet addresses and moving his 49 retirement wallets through them, but having to wait for 3 or 4 confirmations each time before moving them again. Each time I caught up, I “666"ed him - sent 0.00666 bitcoins to mess up his lovely round numbers like 4,000. Then,all of a sudden, decimal places started appearing, and fractions of bitcoins were jumping from wallet to wallet like grasshoppers on a hotplate without stopping for confirmations.

This is a game in which a sentient closet-based AI locks four girls in a room (with giant metal barriers) because one of them smudged her make-up, and forces them to repeatedly apply lipstick and eyeliner to freakishly giant doll heads until he is satisfied. That’s not my arch interpretation of events. That’s what actually happens.

I created a data visualization with #processing to show the distribution of selfies across instagram. This was fun and only took a couple hours to code up. Massing of form mostly shows geographic popularity and distribution. Large “bubbles” show particularly popular selfies. I took a 1000 image sample size at 11:55PM PST of the latest uploads. Of those 1000, 200 had location data that made them “mappable.”

I’ll try and make a few more of these with different timestamps and perhaps it will begin to tell a more detailed story?

As on Twitter, courting the bot-making community has resulted in a surfeit of novelty. One user created a bot that plays tic-tac-toe in the comments of Reddit threads; another scans the comments for replies with the proper syllable count, then reformats them as a haiku. When it comes to such playful uses, though, the users who moderate subreddits tend to be less tolerant than the site’s administrators. Because Reddit is oriented around topical subreddits, rather than on the Twitter-like option to follow or unfollow other users, the line between novelty and spam quickly grows thin. Thus, when bot-generated jokes lose their novelty or exhibit a tendency to derail discussion, the usual remedy is to ban them from more and more subreddits, until there’s no place left for them to play.

“Somehow it seems to have reactivated itself and made its way along the work surface where it pushed a cooking pot out of the way and basically that was the end of it,” fireman Helmut Kniewasser told The Daily Mail. “I don’t know about the allegations of a robot suicide but the homeowner is insistent that the device was switched off—it’s a mystery how it came to be activated and ended up making its way to the hotplate.”

“Forget extra cupholders or power windows: the new Renault Zoe comes with a “feature” that absolutely nobody wants. Instead of selling consumers a complete car that they can use, repair, and upgrade as they see fit, Renault has opted to lock purchasers into a rental contract with a battery manufacturer and enforce that contract with digital rights management (DRM) restrictions that can remotely prevent the battery from charging at all.”

For the second time this year, NASA is preparing to send a smartphone-controlled small spacecraft into orbit. The PhoneSat 2.4 mission is demonstrating innovative new approaches for small spacecraft technologies of the future. […]

NASA PhoneSats take advantage of “off-the-shelf” consumer devices that already have many of the systems needed for a spacecraft, but are ultra-small, such as fast processors, multipurpose operating systems, sensors, GPS receivers, and high-resolution cameras.

“It’s tabletop technology,” Petro says. “The size of a PhoneSat makes a big difference. You don’t need a building, just a room. Everything you need to do becomes easier and more portable. The scale of things just makes everything, in many ways, easier. It really unleashes a lot of opportunity for innovation,” he says.

Then to get these songs to the top of the charts, the engineer created some bot fans that would listen to John Matrix’s music 24/7. Running on Amazon servers, a bash script would automate the act of playing the tunes on Spotify. John Matrix soon had amassed millions of plays and made $1000 in royalties. The high chart positions of these songs prompted human listeners to complain, resulting in the account being shut down after a month.

Fillmore narrates the whole story with technical details at his Ruxcon talk.

There is a lot of talk about “big data” at the moment. For example, this is Big Data Week, which will see events about big data in dozens of cities around the world. But the discussions around big data miss a much bigger and more important picture: the real opportunity is not big data, but small data. Not centralized “big iron”, but decentralized data wrangling. Not “one ring to rule them all” but “small pieces loosely joined”.

The ini­tial idea of Bul­li­pedia was to cre­ate a the­matic ency­clo­pe­dia from elBulli by using all the infor­ma­tion that we had in our Gen­eral Cat­a­logue. In fact, in a press release in Jan­u­ary 2010 where we announced the trans­for­ma­tion of elBulli, we already talked about cre­at­ing an ency­clo­pe­dia of tech­noe­mo­tional cuisine. In order to turn this project into a real­ity we started doing the­matic works for the dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies of the evo­lu­tion­ary analy­sis. How­ever, already in Feb­ru­ary 2012, we real­ized that in order to do a cor­rect evo­lu­tion­ary analy­sis, we needed infor­ma­tion ear­lier than elBulli itself. At that moment we decided that Bul­li­pedia was not going to be just about elBulli. In fact we decided to extend the project to include all the west­ern culi­nary art.

Like the restaurant on which it is based, A Work in Progress is unconventional with a mix of both high and lowbrow elements. It is packaged as a plain looking three-volume set that is bound together by a rubber band. Unwrapping the package, you will discover in ascending size, Snap Shots, a pocket sized book of candid photos taken at Noma; René Redzepi Journal, a plain paperback designed to look like a composition notebook set in typewriter font; and finally the end product, Noma Recipes, a hardback book with beautifully photographed dishes—each one a presentational masterpiece—that were created during the 12-month journaling period.

The archival record … is best understood as a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of a window into process. It is a fragile thing, an enchanted thing, defined not by its connections to “reality,” but by its open-ended layerings of construction and reconstruction. Far from constituting the solid structure around which imagination can play, it is itself the stuff of imagination.

Neoreaction is a political ideology supporting a return to traditional ideas of government and society, especially traditional monarchy and an ethno-nationalist state. It sees itself opposed to modern ideas like democracy, human rights, multiculturalism, and secularism. I tried to give a more complete summary of its beliefs in Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet Sized Nutshell.

Bitcoin is a digital currency, meaning it’s money controlled and stored entirely by computers spread across the internet, and this money is finding its way to more and more people and businesses around the world. But it’s much more than that, and many people — including the sharpest of internet pioneers as well as seasoned economists — are still struggling to come to terms with its many identities. With that in mind, we give you this: an idiot’s guide to bitcoin. And there’s no shame in reading. Nowadays, as bitcoin is just beginning to show what it’s capable of, we’re all neophytes.

These intrusions took place in January/February of 2012 and affected over 2000 domains, including numerous foreign government websites in Brazil, Turkey, Syria, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Nigeria, Iran, Slovenia, Greece, Pakistan, and others. A few of the compromised websites that I recollect include the official website of the Governor of Puerto Rico, the Internal Affairs Division of the Military Police of Brazil, the Official Website of the Crown Prince of Kuwait, the Tax Department of Turkey, the Iranian Academic Center for Education and Cultural Research, the Polish Embassy in the UK, and the Ministry of Electricity of Iraq

When sleep scientists turned to the study of dreams in the 1950s, few considered the notion of lucid dreaming to be more than a curiosity. It was the province of occultists and parapsychologists. Not until LaBerge produced the first evidence for lucid dreams, during graduate work at Stanford University in the 1970s, did the topic gain a modicum of scientific respectability.

Asperity

1. A policy of cutting resource use and consumption via a reduction in carbon dioxide (or equivalent emissions) and resources that are available/provided to a population. Asperity policies are often used by governments to try to reduce the emissions of a defined population, system or activity.